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ABC News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize for Theory & Practice, her genre-busting seventh novel
Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most decorated authors, has won the 2025 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for her novel Theory & Practice. It's a case of third time lucky for the Sri Lankan-born author, who has been twice shortlisted for the Stella, a literary award for women and non-binary writers established in 2013. (That year, Questions of Travel was shortlisted and The Life to Come followed in 2018. Both novels went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award). Theory & Practice follows an unnamed narrator in her 20s studying for a postgraduate degree and living a bohemian life in grungy St Kilda. Much conjecture has been made regarding just how autobiographical the novel is. Is it memoir? Is it autofiction? And does the distinction matter? De Kretser doesn't think so. "It doesn't seem to me like the most interesting question you could ask about the book," she tells ABC Arts. But the fact that the novel has left readers guessing what is fact and what is fiction is a testament to its success. "I succeeded in doing what I set out to do, which is to write a novel that doesn't read like a novel; that reads like fact, like life captured on the wing," de Kretser says. The novel opens with what turns out to be a fragment of what de Kretser calls "conventional fiction": a young Australian geologist, travelling in Switzerland in 1957, daydreams about a beguiling music teacher he met in London. But then, on page 12, the narrator suddenly intercedes in the story: "At that point, the novel I was writing stalled." What follows reads like a memoir as de Kretser uses forms associated with non-fiction, such as letters, diaristic prose and essays, to create the sense of verisimilitude. The candid authorial voice written in the first person makes it easy to forget that Theory & Practice is a work of fiction — and that was the point. "I was drawing all the time on the techniques of non-fiction to write fiction. I think that is something that isn't done very often," de Kretser says. "It was deliberate, to make people think this is truth; this is reality. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that my life is different from the life that's described in [the novel]. But of course, most readers don't know me." Through the narrator, de Kretser signposts her intention early on: "I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth." Adding to the illusion of realism is the cover, which features a photo of de Kretser, taken in 1986, above the words, "The new novel". "I think this is very clever of the designer [WH Chong] because what that is saying is, 'Here is a photo of a real person, but it's only a representation of reality,'" she says. De Kretser likens the effect to that of René Magritte's famous 1929 painting of a pipe titled The Treachery of Images, also known as This Is Not a Pipe. "[The message is] the representation of reality in art is not reality," de Kretser says. "It mimics it." Given her reading list at the start of the semester, the narrator discovers in her time away from study "French post-structuralist theory — Theory — had conquered the humanities". Suddenly, she had to read "texts" (not books) in a completely new way. "Theory … posited that meaning was unstable and endlessly deferred." De Kretser has drawn on her own experience in 80s academia. "Being at Melbourne Uni in the 1980s, where capital-T post-structuralist Theory absolutely ruled the roost, at least in the English department, I was interested in how one applied theory to literary practice," de Kretser told ABC Radio National's The Book Show. The novel explores the "messy gap" between the two in many facets of life, as it relates to Israeli military strategy or university social dynamics. But it's a tension that plays out most dramatically in the narrator's romantic life. As a feminist, she believes she shouldn't feel emotions like anger and jealousy towards other women. But when her ex leaves her for the "smart, good-looking, outspoken" Lois, her rage is directed towards the woman rather than her ex. Later, when she embarks on an affair with an engineering student named Kit, she feels only a mix of triumph and scorn when she thinks about his girlfriend Olivia, highlighting the gulf between the idealism of feminist solidarity and the messiness of real-life relationships. De Kretser says these kinds of conflicted feelings are fertile ground for fiction. "It reveals the gap between [the narrator's] values and her ideals — she's a feminist — and her practice: what's going on in her life, where she constructs the other woman … as a rival and is jealous of her. "It makes her a multifaceted, complex character and speaks to the novel's theme of theory and practice." Theory & Practice is also in conversation with the late fiction of Virginia Woolf, whom de Kretser describes as a "towering" literary figure. "She did adventurous things with form, but she also theorised women's lives, famously in A Room of One's Own," she says. "And then she lived a very unconventional life herself [as] part of the Bloomsbury set." The narrator of Theory & Practice is writing her thesis on Woolf's 1937 novel, The Years. "In her original idea for that novel, Woolf intended to write a fictional chapter followed by an essay, fictional chapter followed by an essay [and so on]," de Kretser says. "She wrote about 100,000 words along those lines and then abandoned it. I don't exactly know why, but I'm guessing it was just too schematic for Woolf. "But I liked that idea; I thought, 'OK, that's something I could take up.' I didn't like the very rigid structure of fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction; I thought you could mix that up a bit." Taking her cue from Woolf, de Kretser settled on a hybrid form that blends fiction, essay and memoir. But while Theory & Practice offers a homage to Woolf, it's also a critique. The novel shows Woolf as a flawed figure. Reading Woolf's diaries, the narrator comes across a 1917 entry describing EW Perera, a leading member of the Sri Lankan independence movement, as a "poor little mahogany-coloured wretch". It's a moment of intense disappointment for the narrator, who views the modernist writer as a sort of maternal figure: her "Woolfmother". De Kretser says she wanted to explore our relationships with figures we admire, such as Woolf, who don't live up to our expectations. "How do we deal with that?" she asks. "Woolf, a brilliant theorist of women's lives, seeing how women under patriarchy are oppressed, simply could not extend that view to thinking about how colonial people were oppressed, for instance, even though she was married to a man who had served in the empire and was an anti-imperialist. Stella CEO Fiona Sweet describes de Kretser's winning novel as "another example of the depth of her talent as a writer". In their report, the 2025 Stella Prize judges described it as "a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame". In 2025, the Stella Prize received more than 180 entries. It was the first year the Stella shortlist featured books exclusively by women of colour. De Kretser says she's thrilled to have finally won the prize.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Michelle de Kretser wins Stella prize for book that ‘expands our notions of what a novel can be'
'I wouldn't say I set out to break forms, as to invent new ones,' Michelle de Kretser says of her novel Theory and Practice, winner of the $60,000 Stella prize for women and non-binary writers. 'I wanted to write a novel where the reader thinks it isn't a novel because I'm using nonfictional devices and forms.' Tricksy and sly, Theory and Practice – the Australian author's eighth novel – troubles the line between fiction and memoir. It opens with several pages of another ostensibly unrelated novel that is abandoned in its early stages; the reader simply turns a page and is confronted with the line: 'At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.' What comes after seems suspiciously like memoir – particularly to anyone vaguely familiar with de Kretser's biography – following a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman studying English literature at Melbourne University in the 1980s. The Stella prize judges called it 'a brilliantly auto-fictive knot' and 'a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living,' awarding it among a shortlist that included Amy McQuire's essay collection Black Witness, Melanie Cheng's novel The Burrow and Samah Sabawi's family memoir Cactus Pear For My Beloved. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Theory and Practice is also disarmingly quotidian, relatable – and funny. The protagonist drinks cheap wine, goes to parties and watches recondite arthouse films, falls in love and avoids her mother. But de Kretser is playing a complicated and penetrating game with the reader, provoking questions around the concept of mimesis, or the representation of reality. 'I would say about 80 to 85% of my novel is fiction,' says the author. While she did attend Melbourne University in the 1980s, she didn't study English literature; nor did she undertake a thesis on Virginia Woolf, as her protagonist does. 'That's one of the things the novel is saying: don't confuse the representation of reality with reality,' de Kretser says. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Theory and Practice also has a lot to say about legacy, about the things we inherit and the things we reject from our forebears, familial and literary. While Woolf remains an important feminist figure, she had a patrician view of class and could be quite racist, with an uncomfortably colonialist outlook on the world. The protagonist dubs her 'the Woolfmother', and she exerts a problematic influence second only to the character's own mother, who sends passive-aggressive letters to her daughter throughout. 'When you think about feminism, you think of course about mothers and daughters because that's the maternal line, it's the maternal legacy,' says de Kretser. The process of maturation is also a process of deconstruction and reformation, of grappling more honestly with the past. 'The narrator considers herself a feminist and yet she's been hurt by other women and will hurt other women in her turn,' says the author. That gap between our intent and our actions is exploited throughout Theory and Practice, as the narrator begins to obsess about her lover and then the woman who's also sleeping with him. The righteous feminist soon has to confront her own petty insecurities and jealousy – her decidedly un-feminist id – and the result is subtly hilarious. As much as de Kretser's crackling prose and probing intellectualism have wowed awards judges – her Stella win caps a tally that includes two Miles Franklin awards and three Christina Stead prizes – it's this wit, the levity and playfulness of her sentences, that makes her so fun to read. 'I think we confuse seriousness and solemnity. We think if it's funny, it must be trivial,' says de Kretser. 'For me, being funny is a way of being very serious.' In her novel, she pokes sly fun at those pesky post-structuralists – Derrida, Foucault et al – who took the idea of literary deconstruction to an absurd, and eventually meaningless, place. De Kretser remembers post-structuralism descending like a cloud on Melbourne University in the 80s: 'Suddenly theory became more important than literature.' And how did she find it? 'I just sort of skulked in corners. We were all scared.' She laughs at the memory, but you can almost sense the chill run down her spine. Entertaining and intellectual, Theory and Practice is the kind of novel that – like most of de Kretser's work – will not only bear rereading, but benefit from it. The false novel that opens the book contains dark echoes of what is to come, but only on reflection. The themes of the book are layered on top of each other, but also spread outwards like tendrils. And that formal experimentation, so clever but judicious and perfectly calibrated, points the way for future works by the author. 'I quote Woolf to that effect in the novel. She says, 'I want to go on adventuring and changing'. And that is what any artist worth their salt wants to do,' says de Kretser. 'You want to keep yourself interested and intervene in the novel form. It's good to expand our notions of what a novel can be.'
